STP! Stop, think, and praise.

As I look back on my decision to run for another four-year term as your school board member I remember how difficult that decision was. Serving as a school board member, many will say, is a thankless job. I don't find that to be true however, and I freely admit that I enjoy the stops in the grocery store, or in other venues, when folks thank me for my service, and talk about how pleased they are with one aspect or another of the changes we have made! I smile as they say to me that they are sure it is "a thankless job" even as they thank me.

The truth is that working together, we have achieved so much in this community. As the only candidate still running who was endorsed by Community Action for Public Education (CAPE), I remember all too well the conditions we found in a school system that had been neglected by far too many in this community. Schools were crumbling all around us, and there had been no new schools built for thirty years or so. Buildings at Lee High and Woodlawn and other sites had been condemned, but not removed. All roofs leaked every time it rained. Working together with the community we identified well over a billion dollars worth of immediate needs in the physical condition of the schools. The job is not done…. But so much HAS been done!

More importantly, the community had, in fact, nearly given up on their schools. No new taxes had been passed in many, many years, and teachers were being paid significantly less than those in many other districts, and in fact they had been furloughed for three days when a previous board ran out of money! Today, our teachers are paid competitive salaries, and we don't worry about covering up equipment in all the schools when it rains. The citizens in our community have passed tax renewals and new taxes with large margins, and new schools and buildings are going up around the district, on time and under budget. The long running desegregation lawsuit, which began before I was born, is over, and there is no forced bussing at all in Baton Rouge. None. Although I am still amazed to see uninformed people saying that we should end bussing in Baton Rouge! Should all students be forced to walk to school?

During my 16 years on the school board time I have remained true to the principles that CAPE espoused. In spite of the constant bashing of our schools, we have come so very far in the last 16 years. As a community, we sometimes have short memories, especially in the midst of an election when it seems every new candidate wants to show just how bad things are. Some of the things you will never hear from challengers include those items just mentioned, such as new schools, an end to forced bussing, and other things I have referred to in some of my other posts on here. Things such as the cooperation of the School System with the EBR Fire Department, the EBR Library, BREC (all of whom share facilities and land with us all over the parish, something that did not happen before) are forgotten in the unceasing desire, it seems to heap more abuse on our schools.

In spite of pullouts, including two areas that included some of our highest performing schools before they left the system, we have continuously improved on the scores for every subgroup in the parish. By subgroup, I mean different groups of students whether by race or ethnicity, or by other characteristics such as whether or not the student qualifies (based on family income) for free of reduced meal prices. For example, our EBR school system was just recognized as having the ninth highest on-time graduation rates for Black males large districts across the country. I am still amazed that some will take that fact, and turn it on its head and complain that the rate is far too low! (By the way, I agree that the rate is too low… but with an important caveat! Can't we at least take a moment to recognize that every district in the country is having problems increasing the graduation rate for this group of students, and your neighbors and friends, the teachers in our schools, are doing better than almost every other district in the country!) For students who are white, EBR ranks 5th out of all the districts in the state for their achievement, and for students who do not qualify for free or reduced price meals, our students rank 6th out of all districts in the state.

In another study, the researchers at Education Week, the premier weekly that focuses on pre-K through high school issues, calculated the "predicted" graduation rates for districts across the country, based in part on risk factors outside of school control, so called "out of school factors," and then compared the predictions with the actual graduation rates. Again, East Baton Rouge Parish Public Schools were ranked 31st in the entire country out of all the large school systems! No one that I know of us is saying that we have reached the mountaintop…that we can now rest, for the job is done! However, can we not take a moment to thank teachers for the progress they have made? Against incredible odds, and in spite of all the bashing they take?

Intellectual honesty is something I often talk and write about. I ask each of us to set aside our prejudices, our preconceived notions about ideology and what "we believe," and actually look at some of the data and research out there. It might just cause us to pause the next time we have a knee-jerk reaction about "our failing school system." I admitted that I enjoy receiving a "thank you" every now and then… but I would be happier still if this community thanked our teachers for their efforts, each and every day, to educate ALL students who walk (or roll) through the doors of OUR schools. To the teachers and staff of OUR schools, THANK YOU!

Breaking Out of the "Reformers" Box!

Over the last few years I have pointed out to state education officials that there is a clear pattern that should be obvious to anyone looking at so-called "failing" schools in Louisiana. I shared with leaders the average demographics of the schools threatened with takeover by the state: approximately 95%+ of the students qualify for free or reduced price meals, and approximately 95%+ of the students are African-American. For the record, I am neither making any kind of "predictions" as to the academic achievement of the students in these schools based on "low expectations" nor am I saying that African-American students from low income families cannot learn or achieve high academic standards. On the other hand, I am stating that we should be carefully examining why it is that these are the shared demographics of these schools.

Researchers have found, by and large, that neither race/ethnicity nor the income of families has much to do, directly, with student achievement. What researchers have found, however, is that many of the underlying conditions that are found to impact student achievement are disproportionately distributed by race and income. These underlying conditions, which include such things as number of parents in the home, the number of books in the home, the number of hours of televisions watched, and the number of times a week children are read to, are all powerful predictors of student achievement, and are not under the control of our schools. I asked Paul Pastorek, the State Superintendent, to join with a number of groups looking at developing initiatives to impact some of these out-of-school factors. Instead, he started highlighting what he calls high poverty/high performing schools. None of these schools come close to overcoming the kinds of challenges faced by those schools taken over by the state.

I decided to look for "75/75/75 schools" in Louisiana. These would be schools where 75% or more of the student body was African-American, and at least 75% of the students came from families qualifying for free-or reduced meal prices, and 75% or more of the students in the school met state proficiency standards in both reading and math. I did a search using data from a nationally recognized school data engine, School Data Direct, and discovered the following. In the latest data set, Louisiana had 359 public schools in the state where over 75% of the students were African American, and over 75% of the students were receiving free or reduced meal prices. Out of these 359 schools only one school met the 75/75/75 criteria. I won’t even mention the school’s name, because it is not likely that the school actually created the success, since it is elementary, in New Orleans, and is a school of choice. Due to these factors it would require a bit more analysis to determine if it is the school that is achieving these results, or whether the results are the product of some selective admissions practices, and score-scrubbing which appears to currently be a problem in New Orleans. At any rate, ignoring the patterns of the 358 out of 359 schools does a disservice to the students in those schools, and a policy based on the one school that appears to be an outlier would likely not be fruitful. A policy based on exceptions is not likely to be an exceptionally good policy! Instead, let's work together to develop interventions that impact the underlying conditions!

We must break out of the box that limits education reforms to the limited time that students spend at school!

Want to meet your child's first teacher? Look in a Mirror!

The first and most solidly based finding is that the largest source of variation in student learning is attributable to differences in what students bring to school – their abilities and attitudes, and family and community background. (OECD, 2005, page 2)

For some examples of the incredibly powerful nature of out-of-school factors, you might explore the Educational Testing Service report, “The Family: America's Smallest School (ETS, 2007). In this Policy Information Report, the authors point to research looking at state level data for four out-of-school factors in order to predict eight grade reading scores for each state. The four factors were ratio of students to parents (number of single parent families), attendance rate data, television watching data, and the percentage of children whose parents were reading to them every day. (Note that schools do not generally have any direct influence on three of these variables.) Using the data, researchers predicted the scores for each state, and in 45 states, the predicted scores were within six points of the actual scale score for that state. (Really close, in other words.) The authors from ETS are careful to point out the complex nature of student achievement factors, and caution the readers of their report about coming to premature conclusions about the relative importance of any factors.

When the OECD (The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, an international group which includes the United States, talked about the greater importance of outside (of school) factors in student learning, they followed the statement which opened this post with this statement.

Such factors are difficult for policy makers to influence, at least in the short-run.

Is it really beyond the realm of possibility to develop a comprehensive public relations campaign based on impacting at least three of the above factors? How controversial would it be to invite parents to understand the relationships between television access, reading to their children, getting them to school, and the academic achievement of their children? Is this really any harder than a similar campaign aimed at stopping parents and caregivers from “shaking babies”? Why do policy makers seldom consider these possibilities? In part, because we accept myth-information and are looking for “quick results.” Haven’t we learned anything from the business models so loved by those seeking to foster these “competitive practices” in our nation’s schools? A focus on the next quarterly earnings report, driving out a focus on long-tern viability or the public good, sounds an awful lot like focusing on the next round of student testing results.

It is my hope that those who read this blog will carefully evaluate the claims (and myth-information) presented by so-called education "reformers" and ensure that presentations and reports which might be used to guide their policies are screened and fact-checked prior to their incorporation into policies which impact our state’s school children. In addition, it is my fervent hope that the ideology of those who would hold our schools totally accountable for the academic achievement of all students will be questioned by leaders with an understanding of the research on educational achievement that clearly does not support such ideology or mythology.